Sri Lanka Planetarium
Sri Lanka Planetarium is a public planetarium located in Colombo, Sri Lanka. It is the first and only planetarium in the country and maintained as an institute under the Ministry of Science, Technology and Research.
The Planetarium was established on 1 February 1965 by the State Engineering Corporation as a special feature for the Ceylon industrial exhibition held in Colombo same year. The planetarium was designed by the chief engineer from the State Engineering Corporation of Ceylon, A. N. S. Kulasinghe, and was constructed by engineers from Germany. The building takes elements from the Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral and the Cathedral of Brasília. The building has a reinforced concrete floor and a pre-stressed concrete folded plate roof, which was pre-cast on-site. The building was funded by the German Democratic Republic as a gift to Ceylon.
With the aid of a universal projector stationed at the centre of this building, the artificial sky is created on the domed screen above a 570-seat auditorium. The universal projector is a product of Carl Zeiss AG East Germany.
